The present invention relates to compression coding of video signals, and more particularly to rate control with a picture-based lookahead window for dual-pass compression encoding/transcoding.
There are many international standards for digital video compression technologies, such as H.261, MPEG1, MPEG2 (H.262), H.263, H.263+, MPEG4 and H.264 (MPEG4 part 10), that have emerged one after another during the 1990s. Generally algorithms recommended by newer standards are better, but also are usually more complicated to implement. It is easy to find examples of trading algorithm complexity for efficiency. With the fast growth in computation speeds of central processing units (CPUs) and digital signal processing (DSP) chips, implementation of more and more sophisticated algorithms has become practically feasible. It is a trend that video encoders/decoders (codecs) built based on newer standards eventually replace those built based on older standards in applications where specifications overlap, such as for bit-rate, resolution, etc. This replacement procedure takes a long period of time, since it is expensive to replace older video codecs with newer ones. Another reason older codecs continue to be used is that many video streams have already been compressed with the older algorithms, and may easily be decompressed by the older codecs. However where high coding efficiency is desired, there arises the mixed use of both older and newer codecs. In some applications it is desirable to re-transmit video streams compressed with an older codec at a new bit-rate that is lower than the older codec can achieve for the same video quality. Therefore to obtain higher compression efficiency a transcoder having mixed codecs—an older decoder and a newer encoder—is used. A good example is a transcoder that converts MPEG2 compressed video streams to H.264 compressed video streams.
It is recognized by the digital compression industry that dual-pass encoding with a lookahead window provides higher coding efficiency than single-pass encoding. But the cost of dual-pass encoding is much higher than single-pass encoding. The implementation cost is a serious problem for the emerging, more sophisticated, compression technologies, even for single-pass encoding. Using two sophisticated codecs for encoding/transcoding in a dual-pass architecture raises the cost of the encoder/transcoder by almost an order of magnitude over the older technology codecs.
What is desired is the achievement of higher coding efficiency in an encoder/transcoder architecture using mixed codecs for minimal cost.